Simplified Ships and Shipbuilding

Recently, Brian Potter of Construction Physics (whose work I am generally a fan of) and Austin Vernon (who I met in person two days ago and liked) have released a a blueprint for fixing US naval shipbuilding. I have mixed thoughts on their three points:

1. Instead of complex, multi-role ships which have expensive and often unnecessary features, the Navy should focus on simpler ships with narrower use cases.

2. Rather than outsourcing design to third parties, ship design should be brought in-house, and NAVSEA should expand its staff of Naval Architects from around 300 to closer to 1200.

3. Production on ships should not begin until design is substantially completed.

Now, 2 is a position I've held for a long time, and really should write about more. I think they do a decent job of arguing for it, and I believe this is the thing they emphasized most in their policy paper, so I have no quibble at all here. 3 is patently obvious to everyone, and has been since forever. Unfortunately, this means that we'll need to go beyond simply pointing out that the problem exists, because if it was that easy to solve, someone would have solved it. The people who do this work are not stupid. I suspect political pressures are to blame here, but actually tracking down the drivers and providing solutions for them is not something I'm going to get into here.

But of course that leaves their first point, which makes up the bulk of the article. The fundamental thesis, that we need to build more small, single-role ships, doesn't really make sense given the details of building modern warships. First, there are really sharp economies of scale in ship design. For anything which you can call an ocean-going warship with a straight face, you already need a lot of systems, even if the only armament is a manually-trained gun. Adding, say, an anti-submarine system to an air-defense ship is likely to be a lot cheaper than building a second ship, and has been since the 60s. Also, it lets you save on design and tooling, which can have substantial costs in time and money.

Second, and even more importantly, there are a lot of natural synergies between the systems on various ships. For instance, a modern VLS can carry missiles for air defense (both point and long-range), land attack, ballistic missile defense and ASW. So if you're planning on making a land-attack destroyer, giving it a decent radar and combat system means it's also a good air defense platform. And it could do anti-ship duties, too, if we bought an ASM that fit in a VLS. We haven't, but certifying LRASM for that is a lot cheaper than designing an entirely new ship. For that matter, it can also hunt pirates when you don't need it firing Tomahawks or doing air defense, and it's not like you need either of those jobs all the time.

Third, warships are expensive and long-lived, which means that versatility can be extremely important. When Arleigh Burke was first ordered, she was primarily expected to face the Soviet air and submarine threat. That went away pretty quickly, but it was easy to turn her into a land-attack platform by filling her VLS with Tomahawks. And she's since reoriented to the escort mission, while also carrying out missile defense duties off Israel. Contrast this to the Zumwalt, which is much closer to the single-purpose vision proposed here. Even leaving aside the obvious programmatic issues, the simple fact is that the world the Zumwalt was built for, where we would primarily need to worry about projecting power ashore in low to medium threat environments, is gone, and we are going to have to do quite a bit of work to make the ships useful in the modern world.

Then they turn to listing a series of cases of "scope bloat", starting with the radar on the Ford class. I will fully admit that the SPY-3/4 dual-band radar on Ford herself was a disaster, but the SPY-6 planned for later units of the class is the 9-module version that we're fitting to everything where a decent radar would be helpful. Also, emissions concerns on the radar are easily addressed by switching it off, and it's not like it's the only emitter on the carrier, either. Then there's the Burke: "Recent Burke-class¹ destroyers have extensive helicopter facilities, despite their main role being vehicles for offensive and defensive missiles." It's worth noting that the navy went to the trouble of fitting helicopters to the Flight IIA Burkes, which they probably wouldn't have done if they didn't think it was a good idea.² There's also criticism of the LCS, which I can't really argue with because that whole program was a complete mess, and a discussion of the Constellation class, which is complicated and hasn't been going well, but which I don't have a great picture of.

But then we get a really baffling statement. "A likely cause for this scope bloat is the adherence to the “Distributed Maritime Operations” doctrine, or DMO." Now, the mechanism they propose (the Navy expects to distribute its ships in war, and wants each to be able to fight on its own) seems plausible, except that it violates the fundamental laws of physics. The Ford, Burke and LCS designs were all pretty much set 15 years ago, while DMO didn't show up until about 5 or 6 years ago, so unless its proponents have invented time travel and are using it in the worst possible way, it cannot possibly be responsible for whatever problems there are with the bulk of the current fleet. Also, the ships that DMO wants are smaller and less general-purpose than the current fleet, which more or less aligns with the thesis of the piece.

T-AGOS USNS Able

Then they call out a couple of ships that they think worked quite well, first the Perry class frigates and then the T-AGOS SURTASS surveillance ships. The Perrys are the best case for them, relatively minimalist ships that gave good service for several decades, although they weren't exactly top-end warships for most of it. The T-AGOS is a very different kettle of fish. Yes, there are some cases where single-purpose ships make sense, and navies will use them for that. But picking out a non-warship design intended for a single-purpose doesn't mean that we should start trying to separate ASW and AAW missions for our surface combatants. Also, it's worth noting that the T-AGOS buy was cut dramatically at the end of the Cold War, because while the ships were good for one thing, they weren't that useful in other roles.

Then they start sketching their ideal fleet, beginning with "A modern, pared down escort frigate without the bells and whistles". Now, this is the one I have the least objection to, although it's rather dependent on figuring out what is necessary and what is "bells and whistles". I'd even agree that something like an American version of the British Type 31 would be potentially very useful, although this seems a bit higher-end than that. The specific criticism of the Constellation class, that it has a high-powered AEGIS radar, rather misunderstands both what Aegis is today and how modern radars work. Yes, you theoretically need 16x the power to double range, but your range might be set by things other than the range of your missiles, such as the desire to understand the battlespace around you, the ability to detect stealthy contacts or the need to burn through jamming. The Constellation has a 9-module phased array, while the Flight III Burkes have a 37-module version of the same radar architecture. Trying to cut range even further is likely to cause problems.

Then we have "A guided missile destroyer without helicopters or upsized ballistic missile capable radars and only limited sonar". Obviously, I disagree with the lack of a helicopter, which is a very useful thing, and as above, the radar range issue isn't so clear-cut as it looks. Nor is substituting ESSM for some of the Standards. Although a fantastically capable missile, it still has less range and less energy at almost any range than an SM-2. There are already plans to put it aboard Burkes, and I don't think that this will really change that at all. Nor does the proposed diesel-electric powertrain make much sense. IEP might, although it raises a host of engineering issues of its own.

And then there's the "Surface warfare focused destroyer", which will have "an 8 inch gun, offensive missiles, long-range torpedoes, etc." none of which will play well together. There's a theoretical case for the 8" gun as a shore bombardment weapon, but it's a pretty niche capability, and the long history of failed gun development would make me reluctant to try versus developing something like VL-SDB. "Offensive missiles", presumably either land-attack or anti-ship, are going to involve using the ship in a very different way, and could just as easily be in the VLS aboard a Burke. As for "long-range torpedoes", these make the least sense. Torpedoes are limited in range by a number of factors, most notably that they aren't that much faster than their target, so running away works quite well. Also, if you're in even the longest torpedo range, you've been in missile range for ages. They're only useful for submarines, which can sneak in in a way that a surface ship definitely can't.

There are similar problems with a "Ford-class carriers pared down to focus on flight operations". All the force in the world isn't that useful if you don't know what's going on, and yet the proposal is "To some extent the Navy is already trying to simplify follow-on ships of the Ford-class, but much more can be done, such as deleting much of the centralized information processing capabilities." Those capabilities aren't just there to keep electronics techs busy and provide the ship's cat a warm place to sleep. They are in many ways the beating heart of the carrier, keeping track of everything going on around the ship. Without them combat effectiveness, which is what we actually care about, goes way down. There's also a proposal to reduce automation and make it up with more crew, which would have been reasonable 10-15 years ago, but would be pretty silly today, as we've already dealt with a lot of the bugs. I'll simply say I disagree with the proposal to bring back dinosaur-burning carriers, but don't want to get into it at length now.

Then there's proposals for the use of commercial hulls for ballistic missile defense (BMD) and as drone carriers. The BMD proposal would make a lot of sense if you needed to provide coverage for areas with no atmospheric threat where you couldn't just use Aegis Ashore for some reason. But geometry limits how far forward you can engage targets, thanks to a combination of picking up the incoming warhead later and the need to get the interceptor to the warhead before it hits the ground, so you do really want the BMD platform reasonably far forward.³ As for drone carriers, "Drones" covers a wide variety of possible vehicles, and I'd really like more specifics on exactly what types of drones and what they're supposed to do. Are we talking about fixed-wing or rotary wing? Something small like ScanEagle or big like Mojave? I've thought about this a fair bit, and haven't figured out a case where I think it makes sense for the US to invest in a dedicated drone carrier instead of just flying from land bases and existing ships. Other countries may have different situations, and I could be missing something, but I'd like someone to actually lay out the case instead of just talking about "drones" as some sort of unified category.

A drone minesweeperhunter

After this comes auxiliaries, the first of which is "a drone-based minesweeper platform". Now, I will be the first to agree that the US has shamefully underinvested in mine warfare work, and that this is an area where unmanned platforms are definitely the future, and have the potential to pay real dividends. But this isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention for the last 30-40 years. And the focus on sweeping as opposed to minehunting seems dubious at best, given that it requires figuring out what the mines are actually looking for instead of just finding them and blowing them up.

And finally, there's a proposal for "Pared-down LSTs and troop ships". The authors think that modern amphibious warfare doctrine, focused on going around defenses (and which dates back more like 70 years than 40 years) is a mistake and we should more or less return to traditional beaching craft, on the grounds that it's too expensive for the volume we'd need in a great power war and helicopters are too vulnerable. I find this puzzling. The basic drivers of the over-the-horizon amphibious doctrine, the vulnerability of massed fleets of landing ships to attack, haven't really gone away. If you're planning to put a lot of very vulnerable ships in a small area, I really hope you have good air defenses. And it's really not clear who they're planning to use a massed amphibious landing against anyway.

I think I will wrap things up here. It's an interesting take on problems by a pair of outsiders to the naval procurement world, but I don't think that the prescriptions would produce good ships. More broadly, I would urge an attitude of conservatism (not in the political sense) towards military procurement, as more thought has usually gone into existing systems than is obvious to outsiders, and it's easy to miss things if you aren't deep in that world.